To create a Silverlight application and host it in a custom website, you could use the following steps: a) Create a Silverlight project in Blend, and test it. We assume that you are now ready to publish the application on a website. b) Open the solution in Visual Studio 2010 c) Right click on the…

Expression Blend 4 has support for authoring custom project and item templates, similar to Visual Studio. However, our support is a strict subset of what Visual Studio supports, and a few changes are necessary to the .vstemplate file to have the projects and items correctly displayed in Blend. A notable exclusion to what Blend supports,…

For Blend 4, we have added a new extension point to our Asset library – ToolboxExampleAttribute. Like most of our other attributes Consider this scenario (which we ran into as we were adding new content into our SDK – the various shapes like Star, Arc, Donut, etc): say you have a type Foo that is…

With Blend 4, we have made a number of significant changes to how we generate XAML, primarily with the aim of generating more compact XAML. You will find a couple of these interesting: a) DoubleAnimation v/s DoubleAnimationUsingKeyframesIn Blend 3, rotating a Rectangle in a Storyboard would give you the following:<Storyboard x:Name=”Storyboard1″> <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames BeginTime=”00:00:00″ Duration=”00:00:00.0010000″ Storyboard.TargetName=”rectangle”…

Blend 3 brings to the table really sophisticated support for sample data, enabiling better designability of your applications. In my previous post, I demonstrated how designers could leverage this feature to prototype data connected applications inside Blend . However, for really sophisticated applications, richer support might be desirable – for example, you might want to use your…

Here is a collection of a few of the blog posts I came across around the new databinding features in Blend 3. Hope you find them useful! Sample datahttp://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/17/blend-3-great-feature-1-sample-data.aspx http://silverzine.com/tutorials/how-to-create-sample-data-in-blend-3/http://www.85turns.com/2009/07/12/overview-of-sample-data-in-blend-3/http://www.cynergysystems.com/blogs/page/michaelwolf?entry=silverlight_blend_3_sample_datahttp://blogs.msdn.com/unnir/archive/2009/03/18/introducing-sample-data-support-in-blend-3.aspx Master/Detail scenarioshttp://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/18/blend-3-great-feature-2-master-details-screens.aspx Element to Element bindinghttp://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/19/blend-3-great-feature-3-silverlight-element-binding.aspx TreeView controlhttp://geekswithblogs.net/tkokke/archive/2009/06/29/styling-a-treeview-in-silverlight-and-blend-3.aspxhttp://shawnoster.com/Blog/Silverlight-TreeView-Connecting-Lines-And-Blend-3-Support-for-HierarchicalDataTemplates DataGrid controlhttp://blogs.msdn.com/unnir/archive/2009/03/19/datagrid-support-in-blend-3.aspxAutoCompleteBox controlhttp://blogs.veracitysolutions.com/how-to-get-a-silverlight-3-autocompletebox-to-show-sample-data-in-blend-3/ Under the covers (Advanced topics explaining the magic behind all this!)http://blogs.msdn.com/unnir/archive/2009/07/12/introducing-sample-data-for-developers.aspxhttp://etvorun.spaces.live.com/http://www.robfe.com/2009/08/design-time-data-in-expression-blend-3/

While Blend 3 has a number of stellar features that I am sure everyone reading this blog has heard about (buzz words include SketchFlow, behaviors, sample data support, Illustrator and Photoshop import, TFS support, and many more), we really devoted a significant amount of time to address issues that you reported via Connect, that we…

For Blend 3, we have completely re-designed the Asset Library. Here are some of the highlights: a) Categorization for various assets makes discoverability easier.b) Searchability allows for quick location of an asset across categories like Controls, Effects and Behaviors.b) Freely dockable anywhere in the UI. We also have left the popup mode unchanged for quick one-time access to…

The last few weeks (or months) have been really hectic! We finally finished all the features that we wanted to add to Blend 3, and are now actively fixing all the feedback (read bugs and crashes :)) that you have been reporting to us, as well as making performance tweaks to the product to make things work really…